Men of Manors

by Di Webster

Guys. I've got an idea for some totally wild scripts that will do big box office. We've gotta do lunch OK, so it's a bit of a formula: rich, dark, cleft-chinned hunks unexpectedly fall for cash-poor, not-too-beautiful women of substance. And everyone is really polite about it. Think An Officer and a Gentleman meets Little Women. Hot? Well, somebody always gets a fever. Steamy ? There is a bath scene with one guy. Believe me, the sexual tension is paralysing. It's gonna work! 

True, she never had this conversation, but for a dead person Jane Austen is one hell of a screen player. Three adaptations of her sharply-observed novels of Britain's 19th century landed gentry---- Austen wrote six books before dying in 1817 at age 41---- are now screenmg in Australia: Persuasion and Sense and Sensibility opened in cinemas last month and the first of six BBC-produced episodes of Pride and Prejudice went to air on the ABC on Sunday. (A film version of another Austen, Emma, is due out later this year.) So why this sudden fascination with Jane's world? A backlash against profanity-peppered, shoot-em-up skin- flicks? Rejection of anything-goes contem- porary social mores? Whichever, one thing is clear: The time is right for a heavy dose of old-fashioned romantic heroes. Here, we present the best bachelor line-up since Four Weddings and a Funeral. 

"I don't think I'm a steaming, smouldering kind of guy," the steaming, smouldering Colin Firth, 34, Mr Darcy in Pride and Prejudice, has said. Try telling that to the 20.7 million viewers enraptured by the $12 million production when it was broadcast in Britain last year, the more than 360,000 Brits who paid $40 for the five-hour series video and the anonymous woman who bought Firth's shirt for $1,000 at a charity auction. But, as he pointed out to London's The Times, "Pride" is not about sex (a racy highpoint is Mr Darcy glimpsed briefly in his bath). It is about "the sexuality of repression. When you read the book, you know that everybody's horny, all that flirtation and dancing and conversation, but nobody's going to get laid." Not that you'll see on telly anyway. Off-screen, Firth and his leading lady, Jennifer Ehle, 26, who plays Pride's Lizzy Bennet, got closer than skin to a whalebone corset, according to production sources, one of whom spoke of Ehle's "bruised lips". "Yes, it's true they fell in love for real," an associate of Ehle's revealed to a tabloid newspaper. "But they are not together any more." 

Firth's six-year relationship with American actress Meg Tilly (Agnes of God, Tne Big Chill), whom he met on the set of Valmont in 1988, ended amicably 18 months ago. The couple have a son, Will, 4. "My life changed totally when he was born," Firth, whose own parents were academics, told London's Daily Express last year. "Fatherhood is mind-blowing." Life for the London Drama Centre graduate, who has recently filmed Nostromo with Albert Finney in South America and The English Patient with Ralph Fiennes in Rome, revolves around his son. "When Will's around," he told the paper, "I can't be involved with a woman." Such restraint may have helped his Mr Darcy to appear, in the words of The Guardian's TV critic Nancy Banks-Smith, "like a ravenous mastiff that has been put on his honour not to touch that sausage". 

Unlike Firth, who describes Pride and Prejudice as "a favourite book", Persuasion's steaming and smouldering Ciaran Hinds says he'd neither read nor was he interested in Austen before taking the role of Captain Wentworth, figuring the spinster author was ignorant about lust and longing. "I'd pigeonholed her wrongly -sort of girlie books," says the 43- year-old son of a Belfast doctor. But once he got the hang of it, Hinds was taken with Wentworth's emotional turmoil, the result of being spumed by true love Anne Elliot (played by Amanda Root). "It's amazing that Austen could sense this in men," says Hinds. "How she understands a man's heart and how delicate it can be sometimes is quite interesting." Hinds's delicate heart has for seven years been in the hands of actress Helene, the mother of his daughter, Aoife, 4. Though his CV lists TV roles (Sherlock Holmes, Prime Suspect 3) and such film credits as Circle of Friends and the yet-to-be-released Mary Reilly with Julia Roberts, Hinds jokes he's now "touting for work". 

If screenwriters keep adapting Austen, the chisel-chinned Hinds should be up to his knee- breeches in offers. Notice how those steaming, smouldering lead blokes are always dark and the also-rans are fair and often foppish? Witness 25- year-old Crispin Bonham-Carter's (yes, he's Helena's cousin) cheery, blond Mr Bingley in Pride and Samuel West, Wentworth's blond nemesis, William Elliot, in Persuasion. West, 29, son of British theatrical blue-bloods Timothy West and Prunella Scales (Sybil Fawlty), says one of his ambitions is to sing with Sesame Street's Bert and Ernie. Returning to darker territory is Hugh Grant's pretty but weak Edward Ferrars in Sense and Sensibility, ditto Alan Rickman, 50, whose sensitive Colonel Brandon rescues Marianne . Dashwood (Kate Winslet) after she's  romantically pummelled by the dashing, caddish and dark (of course) John Willoughby (Greg Wise). 

Sense's Golden Globe-winning scriptwriter and its star, Emma Thompson, knows better than most the allure of a man in period garb. The leading lady of Henry V, Howards End and Much Ado About Nothing kept a diary (now published) during the making of Sense in which she de- scribed her dashing co-stars' appeal. "Alan [Rickman) sometimes re- minds me of the owl in Beatrix Potter's Squirrel Nutkin, " she wrote. "If you took too many liberties with him I'm sure he'd have your tail off in a trice." Not so his Brandon, who is, says Rickman, "a compassionate and feeling person. My job, really, is to present a very steadfast image, the opposite of the more mercurial Willoughby." 

Best known as the ghostly lover in Truly, Madly, Deeply and the villainous Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Rickman has described acting as "a buzz" that is "frequently followed by a very swift kick in the guts". His idea of a good time? "Sitting around a table with good friends, some sympathy, nice wine, good talk, what could be nicer?" he once mused. "Except sex. Or getting it right onstage." Rickman lives with economics lecturer Rima Horton, whom he met more than 20 years ago at an amateur dramatic society in London. Fans of the actor, who also starred in An Awfully Big Adventure alongside Grant, will get another Rick- man flX later this year when he stars with Liam Neeson in Michael Collins. 

Thompson's diary also makes men- tion of Hugh Grant's Awfully Big Debacle in Los Angeles last June ("Hugh Grant is in a spot of bother up in LA apparently. Something to do with a blow job. Alright for some, I thought. ") and has lustful references to another co-star, Wise, 29, a Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama graduate. May 16: "Willoughby's entrance through the mist on a white horse. We all swooned." Eleven days later: "Shooting Willoughby carrying Marianne up the path ...I'd love someone to pick me up and carry me off." 

After shooting ended and Thompson's separation from actor-director husband Kenneth Branagh became public, Wise was seen in her company before he left to film The" Place of the Dead in Queensland and Malaysia. 

"It was so obvious his heart was else- where," his former girlfriend, actress Nicky Hart, told the Daily Mail of Wise's falling for Thompson. But it was Grant, 35, who sparked an early bout of bosom-heaving from the candid Emma. May 1: "Kissing Hugh" was very lovely. Glad I invented it. Can't rely on Austen for a snog." 

As the pair embraced for the cameras on a bridge, two swans floated into shot, as if Austen herself were guid- ing them. "Get rid of them, " director Ang Lee ordered. "Too romantic." 

Excuse us ? On Planet Austen, there's surely no such thing- 

MOIRA BAILEY. LYDIA DENWORTH and VIRGINIA GINNANE in London 
 
 

When the man with the niftiest daks [trousers, ed] in England strode sopping wet across the lush ground of the Pemberley Estate on our TVs this year, women quivered in their lounge chairs & rushed out for the P & P video so they could watch the delectable scene in slow-mo. One of the most successful series in ABC-TV history, P & P drew two million viewers, oohing & aahing over Mr Darcy every Sunday night. Firth, like his Pride character, is scornful. 

" I was chased for big movie parts after playing Mr Darcy, but they didn't interest me," the now mousy-haired Firth (Darcy's black mop was a dye job) told the UK's Daily Mirror in April. "Some scripts were simply an excuse to get me back into tight breeches" Turning down the big-budget remake of The Shining to do "an oddity" called Fever Pitch, Firth, 35, is also set to star in TV's Nostromo & TEP with Ralph Fiennes next year & recently went to the US (where Will, his 5 year-old son with Meg Tilley, lives) to film ATA with Michelle Pfeiffer.As for those doe-skin knicks, they've travelled the world, including to Australia for the video launch." But the dummy" an ABC-TV publicist wistfully recalls "didn't fill them out nearly as well as Colin."